Stablecoins Grew Up. Now Come the Rules

The stablecoin market is moving fast in two directions at once. One path leads toward greater financial integration and the other toward greater regulatory scrutiny. The two are increasingly inseparable.

In the past week alone, a flurry of announcements from major financial and technology players underscored the balancing act the digital asset space faces between achieving interoperability at global scale and managing the compliance needs that brings.

Visa added five more blockchains to its global stablecoin settlement pilot, bringing its total to nine; while Meta started offering stablecoin payouts to a limited group of creators. Elsewhere, the Walmart-backed FinTech OnePay announced plans to add stablecoin payouts and account funding to its banking product through a new partnership with the Tempo blockchain; and Anchorage Digital launched a partnership with stablecoin infrastructure company M0 to merge M0’s infrastructure capabilities with Anchorage’s regulated issuance experience to serve a “growing universe of stablecoin builders.”

But as institutions race to unlock interoperability and cross-border efficiency, regulators are confronting a familiar set of concerns: money laundering, sanctions evasion and systemic risk. On Tuesday (April 28), a WSJ report flagged that individuals sanctioned by the U.S. for their participation in the Prince Group scam-ring had later worked to enable the use of the Trump family-linked World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, USD1, on its network.

The news underscores that as stablecoins scale, so do their risks. Fraud, scams and illicit activity remain persistent challenges. But the growing regulatory push is not necessarily a headwind for the industry. In many respects, it reflects a recognition that stablecoins may be becoming systemically important.

Read more:  The Privacy Problem Institutions Can’t Ignore in Stablecoins

Chasing Interoperability While Navigating Compliance

The very features that make stablecoins attractive such as speed, accessibility and borderless transferability can also make them susceptible to misuse. Unlike traditional banking systems, where intermediaries play a central role in monitoring transactions, stablecoin networks often rely on a patchwork of exchanges, wallet providers and on-chain analytics firms to enforce compliance.

In 2025 alone, an estimated $17 billion was lost to crypto-related fraud, with AI-enabled scams dramatically increasing in sophistication.

“The amount of content created for scamming people is absolutely through the roof. Our customers are swamped,” Emmanuel Marot, vice president of products at Chainalysis, told PYMNTS in a conversation about the company’s “blockchain intelligence agents,” unveiled earlier this March.

Still, the future of the digital asset space “sure looks bright,” Marot added, noting that “there’s a real-world usage and a need to make sure that the money goes to the right place.”

Among the clearest signals of crypto’s real-world usage comes from payment incumbents adopting them at scale. Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot has already reached an annualized run rate of $7 billion, growing roughly 50% quarter over quarter.

In effect, Visa is building a multi-chain settlement fabric. Settlement—the behind-the-scenes process of reconciling transactions between banks—has long been slow, opaque and fragmented. Stablecoins can potentially compress that timeline from days to minutes while also reducing intermediary costs.

Elsewhere, Meta this week began offering stablecoin payments to creators, effectively turning its social platform into a financial one. This move revives an idea Meta explored—and abandoned—with its earlier digital currency initiative: embedding money directly into digital ecosystems. The difference now is that stablecoins provide a ready-made, interoperable solution, eliminating the need to build a proprietary currency from scratch.

See also: Treasury Calls for Programmable Financial Enforcement Across Crypto

Building the Picks and Shovels

Behind the scenes, a new class of infrastructure providers is emerging to support this ecosystem. Companies like M0 and Anchorage Digital are positioning themselves as the foundational layer for stablecoin issuance and custody.

This “infrastructure-as-a-service” model mirrors earlier waves in cloud computing. Just as AWS enabled startups to build without owning servers, these platforms allow companies to issue and manage digital dollars without building blockchain expertise from scratch.

The result may be a rapid proliferation of both stablecoin use cases and issuers.

That proliferation was precisely what Anchorage’s CEO advocated for on the latest episode of “From the Block.” Rather than a handful of dominant players, Nathan McCauley said he envisions thousands of crypto-native banks competing in a decentralized financial landscape, emphasizing that, “in a world where there are 4,000 banks, we’re powering 3,999 of them.”

What emerges from these developments is not a single trend but a layered transformation. At the base are blockchains, increasingly interconnected and specialized. On top sit stablecoins, acting as the unit of account. Above that, infrastructure providers enable issuance, custody and compliance. And at the surface, applications from payments to social platforms help deliver user experiences.

This stack is modular, programmable and global by design. But can it scale?

Findings in the March PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Stablecoins Gain Ground: Why CFOs See More Promise There Than in Crypto,” reveal that while more than 4 in 10 (42%) middle market companies have at least discussed stablecoins, only 13% have reported actual stablecoin use.